abandonware games sorted by popularity

In 1988, kids with floppy disks instead of smartphones got Designasaurus, a quirky blend of education and prehistoric fantasy. The premise: design your own dinosaur and see if it s...

There’s a certain dark humor baked into Global Thermo War, a game that tackles nuclear conflict with a mix of strategy and unsettling realism. It’s not exactly cheerful...

In Infidel, you play a not-so-noble adventurer whose moral compass is spinning like a broken ceiling fan. As a treasure-hungry explorer poking around an ancient Egyptian tomb, you ...

Heretic is what happens when someone looks at fantasy and thinks it needs more fireballs and a lot more attitude. Built on familiar shooter foundations, it swaps sci-fi corridors f...

Cybercon III drops you into a cyberpunk nightmare of claustrophobic corridors, hostile robots, and oppressive AI control. You’ll navigate a massive 3D complex, solving puzzle...

Arx Fatalis is basically what happens when someone takes “dungeons and dragons” way too literally. You start trapped in a gloomy underground world because—oops&md...

Blue Force is a police procedural adventure game developed and released by Tsunami Games in 1993. Blue Force is a point-and-click adventure game that follows the protagonist, ...

Ah, Death Knights of Krynn—a 1991 RPG where you fight hordes of undead in the Dragonlance universe. SSI’s Gold Box series wasn’t known for holding your hand, and ...

Exterminator, released in 1990, is one of those games that knows exactly what it wants to do and wastes no time doing it. You’re thrown into a top-down action scenario with a...

In Street Sports Basketball (1987, DOS), forget polished courts and referees—this is basketball played between garages, with trash cans as sidelines and pride on the line. Th...

F40 Pursuit Simulator takes a different approach by putting you in the cockpit of a fictional high-tech interceptor designed for one job: catching bad guys. Instead of large-scale ...

Dangerous Dave is the kind of platformer that defined the early ’90s shareware scene: simple, fast, and just tricky enough to make you shout at your monitor. You guide Dave t...

Roll up, roll up! Circus Attractions turns your PC into a low-resolution big top full of minigames, each one zanier than the last. Think clown juggling, lion taming, and tightrope ...